6
Mandy got up early and headed straight to the basement of her modest two-bedroom home. There, nestled on a metal rack against one wall, sat five cardboard banker’s boxes. Everything her father had amassed on the Dixon case.
After her mother’s death, Mandy had cleaned out her childhood home.
Standing in her father’s study, unpinning each tack from his homemade murder wall, tucking away each photo.
She’d filled up two boxes in under an hour, then discovered three more stashed in the closet, holding twenty years of interview transcriptions and case notes.
Her father had been one stubborn bastard.
Which she’d always respected him for.
Another day in the glamorous world of small-town policing.
Which apparently was determined to get off to a busy start as her radio crackled to life while she was still climbing into her cruiser. One of her officers, sounding nearly breathless with excitement.
“We got a report of a stolen car!”
Mandy frowned. “We don’t get stolen vehicles.”
“I know!”
“Sandford, take a deep breath, then give me the details.”
Sandford rattled off make, model, color, license plate, and several apparently relevant bumper stickers, while she put the Durango in gear and headed for town.
Long story short, one of the locals had exited the post office to discover his car had gone missing.
Admittedly, he’d left the keys in the ignition.
And yeah, he’d gotten to talking to this neighbor, then that neighbor—the post office being the social hub of the community—making his “quick” errand more like thirty minutes.
But still, he’d arrived in a 2018 silver Subaru Forester, which was now definitely nowhere to be found.
Mandy knew the local in question. Midforties, Dave Lee worked as a mountain guide in the summer while teaching ice climbing during the winter. Good guy with a solid head on his shoulders. If he said his car had mysteriously disappeared, she believed him. Still.
“We don’t get stolen cars,” she repeated upon arriving at the post office.
“Exactly,” Dave agreed. “Why do you think I left my keys in it?”
According to her officer, no one had noticed anything or anyone suspicious.
Not a big surprise. This time of November was a dead zone for tourist activity.
The leaf peepers had left with the last of the foliage at the end of October.
Skiers wouldn’t arrive until the snow hit in December.
And nothing would truly get hopping till Christmas break. Meaning…
Mandy perused the parking lot while collecting her thoughts.
This far north, there genuinely weren’t many vehicle thefts—not because the mountains were magically filled with honest folks, but because it took personal transportation to reach a place so remote.
If you had your own car, why risk stealing another’s?
Maybe if someone’s ride had broken down or was in particularly rough shape…But she didn’t see anything that fit that bill. Bringing her back to…
Mandy reached the rear of the building, came to a halt. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
Back around to the front. “Uh, Sandford. Silver Subaru Forester. You mean like the one parked behind the deli?”
But Sandford was already shaking his head. “That’s a silver Forester.”
“But not my silver Forester,” Dave agreed.
Mandy kept her gaze on her officer. “Still, a second silver Forester.” She waited a beat, watched Sandford’s face work through various contortions. He was a good cop, but perhaps a bit too linear in his thinking.
“Wait a second, do you think…?”
Mandy was just getting out her phone to right the situation, when the silver Subaru in question turned into the parking lot and came to a slow rolling stop beside them.
Minnie Vasquez, a hundred and twenty if she was a day, could just be spotted peering over the steering wheel. Another second, then the driver’s side window buzzed down.
“I’d like to report a car thief,” the diminutive senior citizen stated primly. “Me!”
Dave Lee had the good sense to break out laughing. “Minnie, did you drive my Subaru home by mistake?”
Mandy turned to her deputy. “Good news, this means much less paperwork.”
With truth, justice, and the American way once more restored to the tiny town of Shereford, Mandy returned her attention to her current priority—namely, the banker’s boxes sitting in the back of her vehicle.
She pulled up in front of the police station and started unloading.
Back in the day, Mandy’s father had operated out of a drafty three-room office cobbled together on the second floor of the town’s municipal garage.
Basically, plows and service vehicles below, the police chief and chamber of commerce above.
Her father never complained. Good community policing is intimate, he liked to say.
Up close and personal. If he was doing his job right at all, he shouldn’t be spending time in the “loft.”
It was Mandy’s good fortune that a few years back, taxpayers had voted to build a bigger library.
Which meant the old building, a turn-of-the-century cranberry bungalow with gorgeous mullioned windows and golden hardwood floors, became available.
Nestled right on the village strip with easy access for townspeople and tourists alike, it’d felt like a natural fit for Mandy’s department.
Her and her officers’ jobs were to be available to the public.
Couldn’t get much more available than this.
It still made Mandy smile each time she shouldered her way through the intricately milled door of what had to be the world’s most beautiful police station.
More good news, because she and her three full-time officers were more out than in, she had plenty of options for where to re-create her father’s murder board.
She decided to go with the back records room, mostly so curious visitors weren’t greeted by such a macabre sight.
Especially once the word got out and the looky-loos started descending like flies.
Mandy went with an abridged version of her father’s work. Hanging key photos of the family, initial crime scene and investigative efforts, plus a punch list of unanswered questions.
She knew so much about this crime in some ways, and yet, as a secretive voyeur, had never gone through it as a cohesive whole, beginning to end.
Now she pored over the massive investigative binder, flipped through reports and files and interview notes.
Her father arriving at the scene, led there by a dog named Dog.
Securing the scene, then summoning his own officers for assistance while contacting the state police.
They’d sent a sergeant and a slick sleeve to assess the situation, which, given the mysterious circumstance and bloody footprints, had contacted Major Crimes.
It had rapidly become a multilayered and fast-moving clusterfuck from there. Mandy had actually found those words written in her father’s handwriting in one of the reports. And to think she’d never heard him swear.
The state had assumed responsibility for processing the house, which made sense as the Shereford PD didn’t even have digital fingerprinting let alone a forensic Total Station.
Mandy’s father had taken charge of local search operations, reaching out to all the neighboring towns’ police and rescue organizations for assistance.
The intense storm had obliterated any trace of tire treads, meaning there was no way to know if a vehicle, intruder or otherwise, had recently been on the property.
Given the Dixon family van was still parked in the garage, it was possible the entire family had set off on foot for one reason or another.
Mandy’s father had established an initial perimeter of three miles into the woods, mostly a guesstimate based on a reasonable distance the youngest Dixon might be able to walk, and had organized efforts accordingly.
In the coming days, the search party and scope would expand exponentially, from inspecting nearby forests and streams with the assistance of dog teams and community volunteers, to watching any and all security videos from local establishments.
While Chief Ian Grady continued to hunt for signs of the family, the state police focused on unknown vehicles spotted in the area in the twenty-four hours surrounding the family’s disappearance.
They also conducted a deep dive into Dave’s and Janet’s backgrounds.
Possible business dealings, love triangles, poor life decisions.
And of course, the gossipmongers went into overdrive.
Dave Dixon had a gambling problem, owing huge sums of money to people from whom he never should’ve borrowed huge sums of money.
Dave Dixon was having an affair; his lover arrived that night in an unmarked van, at which point they killed his family, then ran away to start a new life together.
Janet Dixon had been having an affair, and her lover slaughtered everyone, including her, in a jealous rage.
They were kidnapped for ransom, which the larger Dixon family opted not to pay.
One of the kids had seen something he/she shouldn’t have seen, and the entire family had been whisked away into witness protection.
The theories were fast and furious. And as Mandy continued to read, the investigators painstakingly ran down each and every one.
They could find no evidence of financial or business stress, no sign of marital infidelity, and no reason for the tight-knit Dixon clan not to want to save their own flesh and blood.
And definitely no basis for the entire family to enter WitSec.
No bodies were ever recovered. Not a single ATM or credit card was ever used. No white paneled vans were magically picked up on surveillance.
Their only forensic clue, the bloody footprints, turned out to be a bust. The size was too general; the blood type, O-positive, the most common; and the DNA test inconclusive.
Everywhere the detectives turned, they got nothing, nothing, and nothing.
The storm had descended. The Dixon family had lit candles, put out some snacks, then…vanished into thin air.
And twenty-four hours later, so had the dog known as Dog.
Which was the detail her father had been fixated on the most. Why hadn’t the stray returned to its wandering ways, begging scraps from town businesses and sleeping on neighbors’ front porches?
The dog should’ve been homeless, and yet was never again spotted looking for a home.
If you counted Dog as the seventh member of the Dixon family, then he’d essentially disappeared as well, but one day later.
Because the trauma made him run away?
Or he’d finally discovered where to run to?
Chief Ian Grady had obsessed over that answer.
Which made Mandy equally curious. Sometimes, it was the smallest things that were the most telling.
The dog named Dog.
What had that canine known that the rest of the community never figured out?